The document discusses inbound marketing strategies for startups. It recommends creating and sharing high-quality content to attract and engage customers through search engines, social media, blogs and other online channels. Specific tactics mentioned include developing sharing incentives, mining social networks for engagement, creating embeddable content, and giving the community a platform to contribute user-generated content. The goal is to earn interest from potential customers through these inbound channels rather than relying primarily on paid advertising.

1. Inbound Marketing for Startups How to earn your customers’ interest, rather than buying it with great content, SEO, social & conversion marketing. Rand Fishkin | CEO http://bit.ly/imforstartups

2. Let’s Start with a Story

3. R My First 6 Years as a Startup Founder Blog post: http://randfishkin.com/blog/103/just-keep-going Rand and Gillian’s Combined Personal Debt

4. The Last 5 Years More about Moz’s History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits We took one round of financing in 2007; $1.1MM from Ignition + Curious Office

5. The Last 5 Years More about Moz’s History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits Launched our Link Graph Index

6. The Last 5 Years More about Moz’s History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits In 2009, we dropped consulting entirely

7. The Last 5 Years More about Moz’s History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits 2010 had 7,000 paying subscribers

8. The Last 5 Years Full story at http://randfishkin.com/blog/128/misadventures-venture-capital-funding Monthly Visits Failed to raise funding (despite long, nasty efforts) in 2009 and 2011

9. The Last 5 Years More about Moz’s History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits 2011 will be our first 8-figure year, with 15,000 subscribers and nearly 1.5mm visits/month

10. How Do We Get Customers? ~18% of our signups come via paid channels (in blue); the rest are via inbound channels Paid Channels Inbound

11. Interruption vs. Inbound

12. Interruption Marketing

13. Inbound Marketing

14. Interruption Marketing

15. Inbound Marketing

16. Interruption Marketing

17. Inbound Marketing

18. Some Marketing

19. Interruption… Stop Us

20. From Doing What We Want

21. R So It Can Sell Us

22. R Stuff We Don’t Need

23. That’s Interruption Marketing.

24. R

25. R Interruption Marketers

26. R Interruption Marketers Me

27. R Interruption Marketers Me Ads

28. R That’s Not How We Roll.

29. How People Buy in 2011

30. R Realize a Need

31. R Investigate Options

32. R Ask Our Friends

33. R Seek Out Experts

34. R Find Communities

35. R Dig Into Every Detail Available

36. R Convert

37. R You Don’t Buy Those Visitors. You Earn Them.

39. R We’re Here to Help

40. Startups Disrupt Markets. How About Marketing?

41. Inbound Channels

42. Content

43. Influences Everything

44. Without Great Content…

45. There’s No Chance of Success.

46. Content Can Mean:

47. “ Content.”

48. Community

49. Product

50. Or Distribution

51. No Matter the Form; Content is the Foundation of Great Inbound Marketing

52. Search

53. Search is How Things Get Found.

54. Search = Discovery

55. Discovery Leads to Sharing

56. Search is Still Big

57. And Growing Currently, there are more than 3 billion searches/day on Google

58. Search Often Brings the Most Highly Qualified Traffic

59. But Guess Where Searchers Click… ~20% of clicks ~80% of clicks

60. Social

61. Social Lives at the Top of the Funnel

62. Social is Discovery Prior to Interest

63. Social Demands Great Content,

64. And Rewards It.

65. Today, Social is a Huge Influence on Search

66. And Social Appears to Be Fragmenting into Multiple Large Communities (and thousands of small ones) 120mm Users: 50mm 750mm 200mm 10mm Users: 14mm Millions 14mm 6.5mm

67. Email

68. Email is Social’s “Secret Weapon” http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/social-medias-secret-weapon-email.html

69. And Email Marketing is Insanely Profitable/Powerful http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/

70. Conversion

71. The Funnel Only Exists So It Can Convert.

72. Optimizing Conversion Means Measuring & Testing http://dmix.ca/2010/05/how-we-increased-our-conversion-rate-by-72/

73. It Means Listening, Too.

74. A Lot of Conversion is Wrapped in Soft Metrics

75. Branding

76. Messaging

77. Familiarity

78. Trust

79. CRO is a Critical Practice

80. But it Requires Holistic Marketing to Succeed.

81. Building an Inbound Strategy

82. R Who is Your Audience? http://xrrr-slog.blogspot.com/2007/10/corporate-demographics-2007.html

83. R Where are they on the Web? http://searchengineland.com/a-portrait-of-who-uses-social-networks-in-the-u-s-and-how-social-media-affects-our-lives-81653

84. R What Content Works There? http://blog.echen.me/2011/03/14/hacker-news-analysis/

85. R

86. R How Will You Get Visitors Into Your Funnel? Multiple paths can work, so long as you segment them when tracking CR + CLTV Email Retargeting Social OAuth Phone Number Mailing Address Branding/Awareness Free Trial

87. R How Will You Measure & Improve? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-the-roi-of-social-media Step #1: Discover Step #2:Test Step #3: Measure Step #4: Repeat Find inbound marketing paths that look promising and make a list. Invest a few days/hours building authentic value in that niche/sector. Use your web analytics to track primary + second-order impact Throw out low ROI projects; repeat high ROI ones.

88. Top 10 Inbound Marketing Tactics & Examples for Startups

89. R #1: Create Sharing Incentives http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html to link to!

90. R #1: Create Sharing Incentives Urbanspoon’s “Spoonback” program allowed them to compete w/ Yelp and build awareness to foodies, direct traffic from relevant sites and great SEO. Founders credited the concept as being the most important part of the company’s success.

91. R #2: Mine the Social Web for Engagement Opportunities Twitter, LinkedIn, Q+A Sites, Google+, Blog Posts and Facebook can all work

92. R #3: Create & Spread Embeddable Content http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobtrends/home is a great example

93. R #4: Make Your Data Interesting; Share It Probably the best case study around: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/

94. R #5: Mine Your Twitter Followers, Emails, etc. Via Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive: http ://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/using-twitter-and-backlinks-to-build-links/2011/07/28 / ; tool is here: http://simplymeasured.com/freebies/twitter-follower-analytics

95. R #6: Use Social to Connect w/ Journalists + Bloggers An amazing research tool: http://followerwonk.com

96. R #7: Build Features that Require and/or Reward Sharing http://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-Dropboxs-referral-program-at-bringing-in-*paying*-users-i-e-how-many-subscribers-do-they-have

97. R #8: Give Your Community a Platform Moz has a Q+A forum, a blog and a user-generated content platform, along w/ robust user profiles and a points/gamification system. Content contributed by non-employees is ~35% of our overall traffic

98. R #9: Rel=Author & Video XML Sitemaps http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/how-to-implement-rel-author - good how-to

99. R #9: Rel=Author & Video XML Sitemaps We use http://wistia.com to post videos that automatically send video XML Sitemaps to Google

100. R #10: Create a Monthly Top X Influencers in Your Industry http://www.seattle20.com/startup-index.aspx updates monthly, but doesn’t use badges (which I highly recommend)

101. R Blogs + Blogging Comment Marketing News/Media/PR SEO Social Networks Word of Mouth Q+A Sites Forums Online Video Podcasting Webinars Research/White Papers Infographics Social Bookmarking INBOUND MARKETING! (AKA all the “free” traffic sources) Direct/Referring Links Type-In Traffic Email Local Portals Every One of These Marketing Tactics Helps Every Other One

102. I Can’t Wait to See the Awesome Things You’re Going to Build  http://bit.ly/imforstartups @randfish www.seomoz.org/blog [email_address]